Sunday, November 21, 2010

I guess it's safe to say that I am a huge Adam Carolla fan. I've listened to him on Loveline, watched him on the Man Show and the Adam Carolla project, listened to his CBS radio show, and never miss a podcast (even listen to Car Cast, where I am actually learning about cars).

That being said, I couldn't believe I didn't know Adam Carolla was coming to San Jose! On Thursday afternoon, I caught a tweet from the San Jose Improv and canceled our previous plans and asked my husband if he wanted to come with me (as I was going, alone or not!) We got there early for dinner, which got us front row seats. It was like having a private conversation with the Ace man for nearly 2 hours. He was funny, charming and brought lots of new material to the stage. Having the extra component of a slide show (so we really could see exactly what Adam was ranting about) made it all that much more entertaining.

I even nodded along as Adam ranted at me that, as a woman, I need to know that when my husband just starts saying "will do. will do.... will do." (ala Dr. Drew Pinsky), it means he wants to get off the phone. Don't worry, Adam, I promise I will!

I am a good/bad audience member (depending on your perspective), because if you're funny, I will laugh uncontrollably. Thursday night, I nearly went into coughing fits due to my manic laughter :-)

If you get a chance to see him live, don't miss it. It's a great show and Adam takes the time after the show to meet, greet, sign books, and take pictures (as long as you're quick!)

Get it on!

Oh, and thanks to my husband, for being indulgent, riding his bike home at a frantic speed so we could make the express train to San Jose, and holding my place in the autograph line while I ran to the bathroom :-)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Spoiler Alert.... if you didn't watch last night, then don't read this.

Before I start my rant, anyone know who the dancers were for Annie Lennox's "Universal Child" performance? They were amazing!

Bristol Palin somehow, yet again, was at the bottom of the leader board and sailed into the next round - this time, the finals! Sure, she is charming and an "every day person" - not a celebrity (but, why is she on Dancing with the Stars in the first place if not for being famous?). I get that. She seems like a wonderfully sweet young woman, but her dancing is not up to par. Routinely she freezes in the middle of the routine and stops dancing, and yet she makes it into the next round.

Last night she claimed that her success of moving forward was not politically motivated, yet there are actual political sites running 'Vote for Bristol' campaigns. Come on people, this is a dancing competition! I've always loved it for not turning into a popularity contest, and it's worse now that a contestant is moving forward based solely on her mother's political affiliation.

Okay, it is only a TV show, but one I really enjoy watching. Great music, great performances and real personal journeys without fake drama.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

I was sad to hear the news today that Neil Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental that he had converted into a hybrid caught fire and burned up. Seems that not only is this neat car that Neil brought to the Sun Menlo Park campus for a visit gone, but so are some of his other memorabilia from his long and interesting career. Luckily, nobody was hurt and the team seems to have learned something about the charging system.

Wyllys Ingersoll wrote a great post today on the new Trusted Platform Module, and the plugin, pkcs11_tpm.so, that hooks it all into the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework in Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. You can enable and disable the TPM provider via cryptoadm:

Monday, November 15, 2010

It's hard to really describe all of the cool things that have ended up in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express release that came out this morning. I mean, you've all heard about the new packaging system, new installer, and encrypted ZFS, but what about all of the other smaller things that have gone in over the years?

Like sedimented strong crypto algorithms - so customers no longer have to manage separate packages and patches? These were installed by default as of Solaris 10 09/07 (aka Update 4), but I took a very different approach for Solaris 11 - removing those old packages from the OS and making strong crypto just part of all the basic modules. This greatly simplified the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework source code and enabled a lot of projects to move forward, like libsoftcrypto and several projects in OpenSSL.

For the rest of this week, I'll try and highlight other Oracle Solaris 11 Express security features that we've all worked very hard on getting into this release.